Do you own a business that you try to popularize online? Then you should be quite familiar with the basics of drafting a good digital marketing strategy:
- Invest time and efforts in creating comprehensive and relevant unique content for your site to address your industry keywords and to attract the interest of your target audience;
- Work on the UX design of your website to improve on-site lead generations and conversions;
- Do the critical on-site tweaks like page loading speed improvements, image compression and alt tags optimizations, site architecture, internal linking, site-wide keyword targeting strategies;
- Ensure that all important pages on your site are crawled by the search engines and indexed in Google;
- Create a social media strategy and attracting industry influencers to your cause to expand your reach and to promote loud and clear your brand online.
But is that all that’s involves in drafting an integrated digital marketing campaign?
Well, of course, not. We’re missing the strongest signal of online popularity: online referrals in the form of links back to your website from high-authority websites. In other words, link building.
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What Is a Link Building Strategy?
Successful link building strategies aim at popularizing a given brand online boosting your website’s traffic and domain authority. This effort involves convincing relevant, authoritative sites and blog editors to refer to your brand on their online media outlets. Being recognized as online authority proves to have quite a beneficial impact on your business website.
Having a good inbound link portfolio will result in your site showing up higher on Google search results pages (SERPS). Consequently your site will enjoy higher traffic and, possibly, will acquire more leads. This is where a link building outreach strategy comes into play.
But how do you reach out to relevant websites, and how do you convince them to refer your business?
What Is Manual Outreach?
Manual outreach consists of personally introducing yourself and establishing connections with relevant industry news sites, bloggers, journalists, businesses and organizations.
As part of a link building campaign, manual outreach is the single most effective tactic to reap fascinating results and to establish long-term business relationships.
Manual outreach involves drafting and sending highly targeted, relevant, personalized (and fun on given occasions) messages to site editors and webmasters. It gives a more human nuance to your link building outreach strategy and really makes a difference in attracting the attention of your target audience.
Why Manual Outreach Generates Better Results on Your Link Building Campaigns?
Often, link building is done on a mass scale. Going for an automatic template-based emails sent out to dozens of prospects is what the majority of people do to get themselves some ‘link juice’.
Well, even if those people characterize this technique as the necessary means towards scaling their link earning efforts, it’s a sign of plain laziness if you ask me.
I prefer to go with a manual, personalized outreach targeted towards the people whose websites I wish to be mentioned on. What are the benefits of the manual outreach, you’d ask? Read on:
Personalization Is What Matters Most
People pay attention if you take time to address their website, their accomplishments, their persona. With time, we all gradually get immune against spam and ‘I want something from you’ type of online messages. We really do, that’s why your emails should stand out from the rest.
You should attract the attention of your readers; you should make them the center of your message: pay an honest compliment, show knowledge of their work/interests/accomplishments, forget about your ultimate goal and try to establish a connection. Such kind of attitude will leave a mark on your communication and will result in higher response rate and more positive replies.
“Hi Tom I like your www.topstravells.com page” is not enough of a personalization, try go deeper. The easiest way to write a great personalized message, is to find something that you genuinely like about the given website and share your thoughts about it with the blogger.
Show that you care, show you’ve dedicated time to reading their writings and that you know what they mean by those, what are the challenges they face and what are their inspirations.
People love being noticed, understood, paid a compliment – don’t deny them that with automated outreach. Do the work and you won’t regret it.
Tone of Voice
When doing manual outreach, you will have the time to figure out certain dominant aspects of the given blogger’s (your prospect’s) character.
If you listen/read attentively enough, you will notice what their preferred way to communicate, write, address certain topics and people is.
Use this knowledge in your outreach – try to replicate their tone of voice in your message. Thus they’ll recognize themselves in your writing and the distance between you two will decrease.
Making a Connection
By going for personalized manual outreach, you’ll be able to touch upon common interests, share relevant jokes, and follow up on past stories and mutual experiences. The more ‘human’ your outreach email is, the more adequate the response you will get.
Personalized outreach recreates the atmosphere of real-life conversation, thus it makes it highly possible that your message gets acknowledged better and assessed accordingly in terms of a partnership invitation or contribution suggestion.
Promoting Your Own Eligibility
Once you do your research and know your blogger’s interests, blog topic preferences and already covered content you could base your partnership invite based on real facts. Explain to the blogger why they would benefit from mentioning your brand, how their audience will enjoy the added value of your cooperation and how you will offer nothing less than quality, expertise and timely reaction.
Coming Up with Unique Pitching Ideas
Most often, you’d reach out to bloggers with the offering of creating unique fresh content for them. But every blogger is interested in different angles of a given story. Appeasing their specific needs will result in higher success rate on your search for strategic blogger partnerships.
Let’s admit it: if you have a list of 2,3, even 5 topics and you indiscriminately pitch those to all the prospects in your list, how successful do you think your campaign would be? Not nearly as successful as as it would be if you give each prospect what they really want, right? Think about it!
Saving Money on Your Link Building Campaign
In the end implementing a manual outreach strategy will inevitably result in more sincere and friendly interactions. This aspect of the campaign will somehow push the money factor to the background and will highlight mainly the value added to the blogger’s audience.
So, instead of paying for a link you will work hard to get, you can build lasting relationships and build free links. In the long run this scenario is much more natural and rewarding than the alternative spammy mass-outreach approach.
Have you made up your mind already? Are you going to do the work and build strategic partnerships that will last in time or you will open your wallet every time you need some link juice to boost your Google rankings? It is all up to you!
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I completely agree that doing manual outreach is the way to go.
Sure, it many be more time-consuming, but I find that making that human connection is way more valuable, especially for establishing a long-term connection.
And that’s where I find many fall down… so many just don’t see the value in the long game these days.
It’s all about the long game with SEO, Chris. You’re so right. Many companies and marketers miss out on that and just look for the quick win. That’s great and all, but a long game win can be much more valuable.
A Manual outreach is one of the best method of proactively acquiring backlinks to your website by contacting other website owners.
Definitely, Robert. If you have the right touch, you can gain a lot of great links. I do, however, see a lot of people doing outreach the wrong way. Doing it right and being successful is all about building relationships and growing your network. Helping others build their SEO along the way can create goodwill to help you earn more backlinks through your outreach.